Get a Custom Facebook URL with Only 25 Fans!

Hey everyone. I’m a couple of weeks late on this one, but it seems that Facebook has changed their rules regarding custom URLs for fan pages. When the custom URL feature was first announced, in order to get a custom username and URL you had to have at least 1,000 fans Then about a month later, the requirement dropped to 100 fans.  But if you want a custom username URL for your Facebook fan page, now all you need is 25 fans! How about that?!?!?!

You can find the proof here, but I’ll save you the click:

I tried to secure a name for my Page but Facebook said the Page was not eligible. What are the requirements?

Your Facebook Page must meet two requirements: it must have been live …

Your Facebook Page must meet two requirements: it must have been live on Facebook prior to the May 31, 2009 cut-off date and have had a minimum 1,000 fans at that time.

This limitation is temporary. All Pages created after May 31, 2009 or that had less than 1,000 fans on that day will be eligible to claim usernames on Sunday, June 28, 2009 if they have more than 25 fans.

So there. Go forth and get your Facebook username and custom URL!

5 Common SEO Questions Answered by Google’s Matt Cutts

In my experience as an SEO, there are several questions that pop up quite often. Matt Cutts has answered these questions, so I thought I would post his answers on this awesome SEO blog of mine.

1. Should I use pipes or dashes in my title tags?
   “I think they’re both viewed as separators, so I think either one should be fine. Dashes are a lot more common…We definitely handle dashes well. I would expect that we handle pipes well as well.” – Matt Cutts
2. Should I use underscores or hyphens in URLs?
   “It does make a difference. I would go with dashes or hyphens if you can. If you have underscores and things are working fine for you, I wouldn’t worry about changing your architecture.” – Matt Cutts
3. Can the geographic location of a web server affect SEO?
   “Yes it does because we look at the IP address of your web server. So if your web server is based in Germany, we’re more likely to think that it’s useful for German users…We also look at TLD…If you want to experiment, you can certainly try switching the geographic location of your web server [in Google Webmaster Central], which is essentially changing your IP address…” – Matt Cutts
4. Is excessive whitespace in the HTML source bad?
   “Um. We really don’t care that much…Any time we see white space, we’ll separate stuff. And we can ignore white space, so it doesn’t really cause us a lot of harm either way…As long as you’re doing normal, reasonable stuff, I wouldn’t worry about it that much.” – Matt Cutts
5. Does the position of keywords in the URL affect ranking?
   “It does help a little bit to have keywords in the URL. It doesn’t help so much that you should go stuffing a ton of keywords into your URL.” – Matt Cutts

There. I hope you enjoyed that. Thanks to Matt Cutts for answering these questions for us all. I’m just going to send any and all clients to this blog post from now on.